>
> At 01:45 PM 12/19/2005, Charles Brown wrote:
> >
> > CB: I think natural selection is an expression of Hegel's
> > "the actual is rational and the rational is actual" idea, too.
>
> What do you mean by that?
I'm not entirely sure, but I think it might be the exact opposite of Ayer's division between empirical reasoning, which produces propositions which can be verified or contradicted by observations, and analytic reasoning, which produces logical contradictions or tautologies, and nothing else. But then Ayer blows Hegel and his entire school off as "metaphysicians" spouting "nonsense."
Getting to that business you posted (quoted) about how evolution is somehow an empty theory, a tautology, because the mechanism of natural selection is equal to "survival of the fittest," what kind of nonsense is that? Evolutionary theory, or "Darwinism" as its detractors childishly term it, is _not_ a wholly verbal circular argument that fitness equals survival equals fitness equals survival. Evolutionary theory says the only way new distinct species come into existence is through the mechanisms of mutation and differential survival rates.
As evolution is a scientific theory, it _can't_ be "tautological," because like all scientific theories evolution is constantly subject to verification or disproof by observations. Every time you see populations of disease pathogens becoming immune to antibiotics that observation bolsters the theory; conversely, if Jahweh were to appear in Central Park in front of lots of witnesses tomorrow and start waving his magic wand, and _poof_ here's a pteranodon, _poof_ there's a trilobite, _poof_ here's some brand-new crawlie-thing without a name yet ("paging Adam!"), I think most biologists would agree that that observation would somewhat undermine that "only way" of mine in the previous paragraph.
That Pat Buchanan article is chock full of red herrings! Not that you'd expect any better from someone like Buchanan. Where do I start? How about
> But American capitalism proved Marx dead wrong. While
> U.S. capitalism did indeed create plutocrats, the years
> 1865 to 1914 saw historic gains in the incomes and
> well-being of workers...
Me being a land surveyor, when I hear about the wealth of the American working class between the Civil War and World War I, what comes to mind first is the U.S. Homestead Act, which doesn't fit in too well as a product of "American capitalism," and when I think of "historic gains in the well-being of workers," two quotes come to mind:
"...But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as _one_ army, under _one_ flag, for _one_ immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers' Congress of 1889. And today's spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
"If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!" - Friedrich Engels (Preface to the 1890 English edition of The Communist Manifesto)
and
"The public be damned!" - William Vanderbilt
> If scientists know life came from matter and matter from
> non-matter, why don't they show us how this was done,
> instead of asserting it was done, and calling us names
> for not taking their claims on faith?
And if physicists expect us to believe in the so-called "Big Bang," then I suppose they are obliged to have cooked up a "Big Bang" of their own in a physics lab somewhere, or else Pat Buchanan will dismiss their theories as nonsense. And then in the next paragraph
> That picture on the wall of the science class of apes on
> four legs, then apes on two legs, then homo erectus
> walking upright is as much an expression of faith as the
> picture of Adam and Eve and the serpent in the Garden of
> Eden.
as biologists have not reproduced abiogenesis in a laboratory, not yet anyway, this lapse has magically made all Richard Leakey's strenuous paleontology in the field in Africa just up and evaporate!
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net